Authors: Lynn Austin
“What was Karl Bauer like?” Suzanne asked.
“Karl? I always liked Karl. I was only thirteen when they married, but he would bring me penny candy sticks from the store when he came courting Emma. And after they were married, he always treated me to a free lemon phosphate or an ice cream sundae whenever I went into his pharmacy. He was a friendly, outgoing man, always taking time to joke with his customers or inquire about their health. At the time, I was only vaguely aware that Emma was unhappy.”
“Why did she break so completely with your family?” Suzanne asked. “It seems odd that after the divorce Grandma Emma never came back to Bremenville to visit and never brought Mom back.”
“What did she tell you the reason was?” Aunt Vera asked carefully.
“She wouldn’t give me any reason at all,” Grace said. “That’s what’s so frustrating. I’d love to get to the bottom of it if I can so that you and Mother can be reunited someday.”
Vera seemed to consider her words before replying. “I believe Emma had an argument with Papa. Of course, no one would tell me the truth about what was going on, but I gathered that Papa wanted her to return to Karl and she refused. I think she stayed away after the divorce because she was afraid the disgrace of it would hurt our family. Respectable Christian women simply didn’t run off on their husbands—especially not a pastor’s daughter. Papa was so devastated by the whole mess that he resigned from the pulpit.”
“Did my mother know about that?” Grace asked.
Aunt Vera shrugged. “I don’t know. Of course in the end, the congregation refused to accept his resignation. They begged him to stay, so he did. But losing Emma grieved him as much as losing Eva had. Afterward Papa drew even closer to God and closer to his congregation. It was as if his own suffering helped him better understand their suffering. I remember him reading the Scriptures one Sunday, and he nearly broke down and wept right in front of everyone.” Vera stared sadly into space.
“Do you remember what the Scripture was?” Suzanne asked softly.
“Oh yes. I’ve never forgotten.” She paused, and for a moment it seemed as if she might weep too. “It was the verse in John where the woman had been caught in adultery and Jesus said, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’”
The word
adultery
flew at Grace like a hot potato, suddenly tossed into her lap. She wanted to fling it far away, before it had time to scorch her heart, but it was too late.
Aunt Vera sighed. “Of course, there were so many horrible rumors flying around town about Emma that I suppose if I heard about them, Papa and the rest of the church must have heard them too.”
Suzanne sat forward in her chair. “What kind of rumors?”
“I won’t say,” Aunt Vera said with a quick shake of her head. “It isn’t Christian to repeat gossip and rumors. Especially concerning my own sister.”
“Aunt Vera, the rumors are fifty years old,” Suzanne said. “Besides, we already saw the divorce papers. We know that Karl claimed marital infidelity as the reason for the divorce. He must have been the one spreading the rumors.”
“Oh no, you have it all wrong. Karl would never do a thing like that, in spite of how much Emma hurt him when she left. He respected Papa too much to do such a thing. The Bauers were old family friends, you know. I don’t know where the rumors started, but they didn’t come from Karl.”
“Then why did the divorce papers say . . .”
“Well, he had to put something, didn’t he?” Aunt Vera was indignant. “They wouldn’t grant divorces for any old reason like they do nowadays.”
Grace glanced at Suzanne, but she wouldn’t meet her gaze. She drew a deep breath and plunged into the conversation. “My mother told me she left my father because she was pregnant with me and he didn’t want a baby. Do you know anything about that? Can you think of a reason why he wouldn’t have wanted me?”
Vera took a moment to refill their coffee cups before answering. “I didn’t even know Emma was wearing her apron high until Mama and I went to see her at Christmastime. That visit was one of the few secrets my mama ever kept from Papa. He had forbidden us to contact Emma, hoping that being cut off from everyone would bring her to her senses and back to Karl. But we took the train into the city to go Christmas shopping, and of course Mama went to see Emma. I was shocked when I saw that she was in a family way. I remember thinking, surely now she’ll go back to Karl. But she didn’t.”
“Do you know if my father ever saw me when I was a baby?”
“Karl? I don’t know. He’s the one who gave us Emma’s address and paid our train fare, so he obviously knew where she lived.”
“Was that the last time you saw my mother? That Christmas?” Grace asked.
“No, she came home when Papa died.”
“I don’t remember that at all,” Grace murmured.
“You were away at nursing school. Emma came alone. She was distraught because she and Papa had never reconciled. I remember how she wept and wept, saying she was sorry she had arrived too late.”
“What did your father die from?” Sue asked.
“A heart attack, but it was really God’s mercy that he died. It was 1943, you see, and right in the middle of the Second World War. He was a pacifist all his life, and the news of all the injustice and brutality killed him. He would read the reports of what was happening in Germany—he and Mama still had relatives there—and he just couldn’t bear the news. But God took him home before he could learn the full truth about Hitler’s atrocities. It would have broken his heart. He was seventy-four.”
“But Emma wasn’t feuding with her mother,” Grace said. “Why didn’t she come home after her father died? Why didn’t she bring me home?”
“Emma promised that she would, but then Mama died four months after Papa. The last time I saw Emma was at Mama’s funeral.”
“What did she die from?”
“That was God’s mercy too. He allowed her to go home with her husband. Before she died I remember asking, ‘How are you, Mama?’ and her eyes filled with tears and she said, ‘How do you think I am with my Friedrich in the grave?’ She loved him deeply. And he loved her.”
They all fell silent for a moment. Suzanne seemed to have run out of questions. Grace remembered her own two objectives and searched for a way to frame her next question.
“Aunt Vera, can you tell me anything at all that will help me understand why my mother left Karl and never went back?”
“No, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Emma and Karl are the only ones who really know what went on between the two of them, and he’s been dead for ten years now. Lung cancer. After that, Karl’s wife sold the drugstore. It’s an ice cream parlor and—”
“Wait a minute,” Suzanne said. “His
wife
? You mean Karl remarried?”
“Yes, he married a widow woman with a little boy. The boy later died
when he was in his teens. Drowned in the river in a boating accident. A terrible tragedy.” Her gaze grew unfocused as she stared into the past. Suzanne’s next question brought her back.
“Does his wife still live around here?”
“No, I believe she moved down by Harrisburg, where her youngest son lives.”
“Karl Bauer had
other
children?” Grace asked in astonishment. For some reason, she’d always imagined her father as a child-hater, living alone all these years, as she and her mother had.
“Karl and his wife had two sons—well, three counting the boy who drowned. It was a shame that neither of them wanted the drugstore, though. Leo Bauer works for the phone company in Harrisburg, but Paul Bauer still lives here in town. He’s the principal of our grade school, in fact.”
Grace slumped in her chair. “I can’t believe it. I have brothers?”
Later, as they drove away from Aunt Vera’s house, Grace still struggled to absorb all that she had learned. “It seems almost miraculous to finally meet my relatives!” she said. “I spent my entire life with only a mother. Other kids had sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, but I had no one—until today.”
Aunt Vera had shown her photographs of her relatives—ancient ones of Friedrich and Louise and their families in Germany, Aunt Vera’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, pictures of Aunt Sophie Mueller and her family. But they’d found none of Karl Bauer.
“I still can’t believe I have brothers,” Grace murmured.
“Which means I have uncles,” Suzanne added.
“Do you suppose my mother didn’t know about them, or she just didn’t want me to know?”
Suzanne looked at her watch. “It’s only three o’clock. Let’s go to the elementary school.”
“Oh, Sue, I couldn’t.”
“Why not? Isn’t this what we came here for? To find your family? You can ask Paul Bauer about your father, find out what he was really like.”
“If I didn’t know he existed, chances are he doesn’t know anything about me, either. It’s hardly fair to waltz into this man’s life and say, ‘Hello, I’m your long-lost sister.’ What if he never knew about Karl’s first wife?”
“In a small town like this? That’s highly unlikely.”
“I really don’t think we should bother him. I already regret opening this Pandora’s box even a crack. . . .”
They had paused at a stop sign, and Suzanne smacked the steering wheel with her fist. “You know, all this family secrecy garbage is really frying me! I want to meet Paul Bauer. Are you coming with me, or shall I drop you off at the motel?”
“I knew this trip was a mistake.”
“Mom, why are you so afraid of the truth? Would you rather live with a lie?”
The word
adultery
floated, unwelcome, through Grace’s mind again. “I’m fifty-five years old. I’d much rather live with what I’ve always known as the truth.”
“But I’m dying of curiosity. We can’t come this close to finding your father and turn back now. Let’s just drive over to the school and look for his son, all right? If it isn’t meant to be, then he’ll be home sick with the flu or something. If he is there . . .” She shrugged.
Grace met her daughter’s gaze. “Yes, Suzanne . . .? If he is there?”
“Then let’s meet him.”
It was a short drive to the one-story brick school building. It perched like an island on a sea of grass, separated from the cramped middle-class neighborhood of aging bungalows by a wide swath of green. Just as Suzanne and Grace pulled into the parking lot, hundreds of kids flooded out of the doors, squealing and shoving as they ran to board a long line of yellow school buses. Grace watched the pandemonium with a sick feeling, remembering her own daily walks home from school, enduring the taunts and jeers of her classmates.
“Where’s your father, Grace?” “How come he doesn’t live with you?”
Nearly fifty years later, she was still trying to answer that question.
They waited until the last bus pulled away, until the flag was lowered and folded for the night. Except for a few stragglers with bulging backpacks, the school grounds were quiet once again.
“Do you want to wait in the car, Mom?”
Grace shook her head, smiling faintly. “I always wanted a baby brother. I used to beg my mother endlessly for one. She rarely lost her temper, but that was a surefire way to make her do it.”
Inside, the school smelled of sweaty children and leftover lunches. The empty halls were strewn with the flotsam and jetsam of departure, like a deserted beach after a storm. Grace halted outside the main office where a sign read
Paul A. Bauer, Principal
.
“Cold feet again?” Suzanne asked.
“No, it’s just so odd to see someone else with my name. I grew up in ‘little Ireland,’ remember? Surrounded by Mulligans and Murphys and O’Sullivans.”
Suzanne pulled open the door and strode up to the secretary’s desk. “Hi. Is Principal Bauer available? My name is Suzanne Pulaski.”
The secretary was a round, bustling woman in her sixties who looked as though she probably hugged every child who walked through the door. Her smile was warm and genuine. Grace liked her immediately.
“Pulaski?” the secretary asked. “Does this concern one of our students?”
“No,” Sue replied, “my mother and I are tracing our ancestry and it turns out there is a Bauer in our family.”
The woman inhaled with delighted surprise. “Really? I took a course in genealogy last winter over at the high school! It was so fascinating! And guess what! I found out that one of my ancestors was related to William Penn! You know, the founder of Pennsylvania.”
“Imagine that,” Suzanne said. Grace heard the sarcasm in her tone and hoped this friendly woman didn’t. “We’d really like to meet with Principal Bauer if he’s free.”
“Let’s see . . . he’s around here somewhere . . .” She glanced around the office as if he were a misplaced memo. “Mr. Bauer always supervises our dismissal, you know. He should be back any minute, now that the buses have left.”
“Great. We’ll wait in here.” Suzanne strode past the woman and into the principal’s office, seating herself in one of the chairs facing his desk.
Suzanne’s assertiveness astounded Grace. Women from Suzanne’s generation seemed poorly mannered to her—not to mention unladylike. Did such confident behavior come with having a professional career?
Grace turned to the secretary. “Is it all right if we wait in his office?” she asked, then waited for permission before going inside and taking a seat beside her daughter. “You were very rude,” she whispered to Suzanne.
“Oh, Mom, please. Spare me the lecture. Besides, this gives us a chance to check out the family photos before he arrives.” Two picture frames were lined up on his desk, facing the other way; Suzanne picked up one of them and turned it around.
“Suzanne! Don’t-!”
“He wouldn’t leave pictures out in the open if he didn’t want anyone to see them. Here, have a look—could they be relatives of ours?”
She thrust the picture into Grace’s hand—a studio portrait of a man and woman in their mid-forties, surrounded by three fluffy, over-painted, teenaged girls. Grace looked closely at the unsmiling man, searching for a resemblance to the grainy black-and-white image of Karl Bauer in her scrapbook.
Paul Bauer’s hair was thinning above a high forehead and round face. What was left of his hair was dark and straight like Suzanne’s, with none of the unruly waves and kinks of her own fair hair. But his swarthy complexion was very unlike Suzanne’s milky white skin. His most prominent features were his gray eyes, which glowered as if he’d been forced into the studio at gunpoint and photographed against his will.